The National Science Foundation's Geospace Environment Modeling program was instituted to foster the study of the Earth's magnetosphere from the ground and space and to model it numerically. C. T. Russell has been a coordinator of this program and from its initiation.

The international Jupiter Watch is a community based program to encourage and coordinate the observations of the Jovian system from the ground and space and to perform analyses that would lead to its better understanding. This program was founded in 1984 by C. T. Russell who remains on its steering committee.

The International Solar Terrestrial Physics Program is an international collaboration of several space missions devoted to the study of the Earth's magnetosphere such as POLAR, WIND, GEOTAIL, Interball and FAST. UCLA has contributed instruments to both the POLAR and FAST missions and maintains the web page for the associated boundary processes campaign webpage.